


Supermarket Flowers

by sobrecogimiento



Category: Death Note
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 15:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/190155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sobrecogimiento/pseuds/sobrecogimiento
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his fugue phase, Light angsts to eight different sorts of smelly and painful death about what he can almost remember . . . but not really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Supermarket Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> Lines in italic taken from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
> 
> (Also, I've marked this as gen, but there may be some Light/L if you squint.)

The worst thing, he often reflected, was how horribly vague everything was, or, at the very least, everything important. First and foremost, there was always the matter of whether or not he was Kira. If it was looked at logically, reasonably, as everything in this world of underground rooms, computer screens, and detective work had to be, the answer was undeniably yes. But whenever that answer surfaced, another part of his brain screamed a resounding no. No, I'm not Kira, I'm not a serial killer, I can't be, I just fucking can't be! I wouldn't do that, would I? Would I? 

Would he? A simple, close ended question that would take only a second to answer, yet Light couldn't, wouldn't, answer it. He could not remember, and, with the lack of knowledge, was the lack of the most concrete piece of evidence he could hope to get. What was he doing in his room all those hours, when he wasn't studying, but couldn't remember exactly what he was writing about? What did he say, on the bus, to the FBI agent who had ended up dead, and to that man's fiance, who was now missing? "Why do you keep checking the time?" she had asked. He remembered that perfectly, vividly, but didn't know what he said next. God, why couldn't he fucking remember? 

 _"And this card, which is blank, is something that he carries on his back, which I am forbidden to see."_  

Then there were those looks that L gave him, usually after he said, "Hey, Ryuzaki . . ." then, "never mind." It meant that Light had come across some piece of evidence, then realized, a second too late, that it somehow led back to him being Kira. And L knew it, and gave him the look, which lasted a second and an eternity in its own right. Yes, it said, I do think you are Kira. I think you killed those people by your own will and without mercy. I think that unavoidably, undeniably, one of us will kill the other because you are Kira and I am in your path and there is no other way. But it also said, I'm sorry that we had to meet this way. I wish that you weren't Kira and that the evidence did point somewhere else, but it doesn't. So I'm sorry. Then L would turn back to the humming computer screen, the chain that linked them together clinking gently. And Light always had some crazy impulse to tell him everything, simply because L understood him completely and he understood L completely, and he'd never had a friend before who he could have a real intelligent conversation with, without having to bring his brain down a few levels so the other person could understand him. Maybe, he often thought, if he could just tell someone he'd feel a lot better, even a dog or a cat or something he could just pretend was alive listening to him. But the problem remained that he was handcuffed to L, which was the only someone or something he really wanted to listen to him. But that, of course, was out of the question. 

 _"Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long."_  

The only thing that really irked him was L's percent certainties that he was or wasn't Kira. L knew he was. He was one hundred percent fucking sure, and was just sitting tight until evidence came along. Light was also greatly irritated when L asked him if he remembered how to kill. It got to the point where he even asked when it was inappropiate, like out of absolutely nowhere some nights at the computers. L had to think that the answer would pop out of Light's subconcious if he kept springing the question unexpectedly. So he kept asking. 

 _"Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?"_  

And did he really, honestly, think that if Light remembered being Kira, that he'd tell him? Being handcuffed to L was bad enough. No way did he want to be in a jail cell with only the cameras for company, and probably dead himself soon afterwards, L's justice or Kira's victim or his own. So he answered with the same, tired, "No, Ryuzaki, I don't." And he added in his head, No, I don't remember, goddamnit, I never remember, I'd never tell you if I did remember, so stop fucking asking me. But it wasn't like he could say that out loud, and it wasn't like L would listen to him if he did. 

 _"I can connect nothing with nothing."_  

Beyond all that was the actual investigation, a hassle in itself. Light could never escape the feeling he was leading the way to his own damnation, but there was no way out of helping. If he even considered devising a scheme, about five other voices in his head shouted him down, because it would look suspicious, because L would give him shit about it later, et cetera. He caught himself wondering what they were all doing there, what they were all risking their lives for. Light froze up sometimes, seeing nothing except that they were all rushing towards their own deaths--himself, his father, Mogi, Matsuda, and especially Misa, formerly the second Kira. They all sped towards that black oblivion, whether Kira got them or not. They would die in the end, just like all those filthy criminals. So then, why the hell were they here? 

 _"Prison and palace and reverberation of thunder of spring over the distant mountains/ He who was living is now dead/ We who were living are now dying/ With a little patience."_  

The irony of the situation sometimes almost forced a reluctant laugh from him, but never quite. (When was the last time he'd laughed? Did he even remeber how?) He figured that if both L and Kira lost all memories of being Kira and met somewhere, they would get along fine. Better than fine, in fact. This musing only came from the suspicion that he had lost some memories himself, which, in turn, recalled that he and L got along extremely well. This killed all urge to laugh, but he felt that L's justice towards Kira and Kira's justice towards criminals amounted to the same thing. 

 _"Dry bones can harm no one."_  

For someone who gorged on sugar, Light thought L fell asleep quite easily when he dragged him to bed around midnight after nodding off onto his keyboard or falling out of his chair. Some nights, Light fell asleep just as quickly. Some nights he didn't. Some nights he tossed and turned and no thoughts came into his head to distract him from the images appearing from behind closed eyelids or out of the gloom. And he rolled over again, scowling, the chain clinking, to face L's still form. The handcuffs, he mused, were probably the only reason L slept so soundly. He kept his back to the vague images and lack of thoughts and tryed to concentrate on L's snoring breath. 

 _"But at my back, in a cold blast I hear the rattle of the bones, and a chuckle spread from ear to ear."_  

And though he tried, he could never entirely block the images. They kept coming back, time and time again, vague, horribly vague, more like smells than pictures. Smells have a special ability to be vague and also to suddenly bring an experience back through the years, even through lifetimes. Yes, the images were vague, a bit like supermarket flowers, he thought. Those cheap, pretty things that die out on you too quickly and don't smell like much, not bad, exactly, but not good, either. They smell too clean to be real flowers, completely lacking the undertones of dirt and bugs and some godforsaken field on a beautiful summer's day. The images were just that--outlines, basics that were not colored in and thus lacking everything important. A grotesquely grinning face, hovering next to him, out of which came an inhuman voice. Another figure, not unlike the first, but different somehow, more of something or less of something, more feminine, maybe? It stood behind someone . . . someone . . . who was that? A girl? No, a man . . . ? Tantalyzingly familiar, but still too vague to tell. Who the hell  _were_  they? 

 _"Gliding, wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded, I do not know whther a man or a woman."_  

And then, finally, after who knew how long, he would feel himself falling asleep. It was only in that twilight hour between waking and sleeping that he could admit the truth to himself, that he was Kira, that he had killed those people, that L was right, that he had, somehow, arranged it so that he would be capable of killing again. He also knew that logically, reasonably, he would have killed anyone in his way, anyone who had found out. L, of course, would need to die. But how far would he go, to keep his power? Would he have killed people he knew, people he trusted? Would he have killed his own family? Of course not, he wanted to say to the darkness permeated only by the surveillance camera's blinking light. Of course not, because maybe saying it would make it feel more real, maybe, it would, if only temporarily, stop the gnawing, nagging doubt. The subconcious, he thought, has no heart. It tells you the bare, painful truth of who you really are and doesn't give a damn how you feel about it. Falling asleep, Light's subconcious told him that deep down, he completely agreed with Kira, completely was Kira, and was the only one with the intelligence and the resources to pull it off. Who did he think he was? an indignant part of him demanded. What right did he have to pass judgement? What right did he have to play God? Maybe once he was Kira again, he'd have his answers. Then again, maybe L would catch him first. 

 _"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."_  

In dreams, it was worse. The images gained substance and were images no longer, but solid things, people, monsters. He saw himself, writing, writing, writing into eternity, about what, he could never tell. More monsters surrounded him, different than the two he was familiar with, but just as inhuman. Sometimes, in the dreams, he wrote at the desk in his room. Sometimes, he wrote on a deadened plain full of skeletons, junk, and lounging monsters. He could see himself there, day after day, year after year, century after century, writing, writing, writing, his fingers gnarled, back hunched, eyes bloodshot. Then a smell reached his nose, and he looked down to see a handcuffed still circled around his wrist, and though he tried to stop them his eyes still traveled down the rusted chain to a rotting corpse with L's bent form. His heart beat wildly, and he made the mistake of looking up, to that dense blackness covering the plain, going on forever or ending in an undistinguishable ceiling or sky. And out of the blackness came all those that he had killed, innocent and guilty, dead, naked bodies falling like an awful rain. These people had never had funerals because no one cared enough to bury them. If it came right down to it, no one really, actually, cared if a criminal died. And so these people had never been buried properly, and were coming back to tell him that it was all his fault, even if it wasn't. He tried, desperately, to struggle away, but always would the weight of the corpse slow him down. And besides, there was never anywhere to go. The bodies mounted up, falling, falling, falling; they reached over his feet, his middle, his shoulders, his head. The stench filled his nose, crept in his mouth, coated his throat, the stench of a hundred thoudand corpses that no one cared to bury. The stench of a hundred thousand corpses that no amount of supermarket flowers could ever, ever cover up. And he woke up gasping. 

 _"White bodies naked on the low damp ground and bones cast in a little low dry garret, rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year."_

The ceiling came into focus and he found himself laying there again, wide awake, listening to L snore. The stench remained, though it was only a phantom. Some nights he gagged and coughed, and lay panting, drenched in sweat, long after the smell had gone. What was he? he wanted to scream. What sort of person or inhuman thing did that to people? And those--monsters. They were worse, he somehow knew; they were created for the purpose of killing people. Why? Why did something like that exist? He wasn't sure who he wanted to yell it at. Maybe at himself. Maybe at L. Maybe at God. 

 _"What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?"_  

It came to him one night, through the haze of sweat and anger and lingering guilt. It was the ability itself, he thought, that kept Kira going. Not the crimes. Not the justice. Not the desire to rule that Kira must have. Simply the ability to kill so easily, so supernaturally, that was it, to do something no one in this world had ever done before. The power attracted people, like moths to light, had attracted him, had attracted Misa, had attracted a bunch of law-abiding businessmen. That was the payoff, he knew, just to be able to do something like that. And maybe those Kira weren't so different from the people on this side of the investigation. L, of course, was doing it for justice, but Light knew he liked the rush of finding more evidence or another suspect. Matsuda had faked his own death for the sake of the investigation. His father and Mogi took risks, too. Was it not the risk, that made things worthwhile? 

 _"The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract, by this, and this only, we have existed."_  

One night, a minute or an age after this mess had started, for time, he mused, was relative, he woke up sobbing. He was not aware of it at first, and it took him a good minute to connect the wetness on his cheeks to the horrible, racking sobs, which, he realized with a start, were tearing out of his own throat. And he stuffed a fist into his mouth and rolled over into the pillow to stifle the noise, the lack of L's usual snores not registering until he felt an arm across his shoulders. Suddenly, Light was crying into L's chest, a load of tears and snot soaking into L's shirt and the bedcovers. Light wondered what made L do that instead of pretend to be asleep, knowing that it had to be a most awkward situation for him, because logically, reasonably, he had to have been raised into this life, to be a famous detective so young. L had never fallen asleep on the couch between his parents while watching tv, had never comforted a little sister who'd been bullied at school, so Light couldn't make any sense to why he was holding him instead of ignoring him, and, in retrospect, could not make sense of how two people so different could really be so alike, which was possibly why L comforted him in the first place. It made no sense, he decided. Light had been raised in a loving family, and knew that L's childhood, L's entire existence, was disturbingly devoid of love. So how was he a Kira, and L so decidedly against the idea? God, he wanted to say, God, if there is a God, why are things like that? Why do they turn out that way? Why does nothing ever make any sense? He wanted to ask L, who would probably know that sort of thing, who would probably give him a simple answer, but he couldn't ask L something like that. 

 _"I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, the silence."_  

"You know something, Ryuzaki?" The voice is muffled, coming from beneath layered sheets and blankets, still a little hoarse and teary, but L understands it perfectly. 

"No." It isn't a rude answer, just straightforward. L still wonders why he feels like crying himself, and why it proves so hard to keep his voice steady. 

"You're my best friend." The truth, bare and painful and a little heartless. Maybe the subconcious is still close to the surface. 

Silence swallows the words, silence that is entirely unsure how to receive them, and so says nothing. 

"It really kind of sucks, doesn't it?" An attempt at jest, but his voice is cracking again. 

L strokes Light's hair, absently, awkwardly, not at all sure what he is doing. It is rather wet, he realizes, like his own shirt. He wonders if it will dry like a washcloth and be stiff in the morning, and decides he honestly doesn't care if it will. "Yes," he says, finally. "It really does . . . kind of suck." 

He is not used to this language, and so the words are rusty, falling out with jars and clunks. Light picks up on this and laughs, though it is more like a sob. 

L drops his arm closer to Light's waist. The chain clinks, but they have long since stopped hearing it. Light stares into the murky darkness beneath the covers. L stares into the gloom above them, purposely turned away from the camera. Maybe he wants to forget that it's there, that this has all been taped, that he will erase it in the morning, against his better judgement. Thoughtlessly, he pushes down the covers a little to let some air in. 

L falls asleep, questioning justice. 

Light falls asleep, questioning God. 

 _Datta. Dayadhvam. Damayata.  
Shantih Shantih Shantih_ 

~End


End file.
